


The Still Point

by Squash (Squashers)



Category: Manic Street Preachers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 06:15:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8653909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squashers/pseuds/Squash
Summary: "Human kind cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future, what might have been and what has been, point to one end, which is always present."You thought maybe to compound everything would be to reveal a truth. Instead, you are sliding away, everything has shrunken to hardly anything, and nothing in this world makes sense.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I reread 'Richard' by Ben Myers recently, and I thought I could do better because his ending is really weird and unrealistic. And I really liked the way his use of second person POV was simultaneously distant and personal, so I wanted to play with that. Also, apologies for the weird way I've done the dialogue; again, I was playing with the idea of distance and things blurring together.

_At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;_  
_Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,_  
_But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,_  
_Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,_  
_Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,_  
_There would be no dance, and there is only the dance._  
_I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where._

\-- T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

 

* * *

 

When you are released from hospital, you find yourself running on an unfamiliar, wire-trilling mania. You cannot seem to shut off your head. There is a mad, anxiety-inducing rush in your veins for something nameless that you desperately need to uncover. You start reading everything you can get your hands on, needing to feed whatever it is inside you begging for more. You find yourself reading six books a week, scribbling barely-legible lists of ideas or thoughts, watching your favourite films over and over and over, scrutinizing every line, every glance, desperately searching for an answer to some unspoken question.

And it hurts. Not a physical pain, nothing like that. Like a tension headache, but under the nerves, an ache of emotional and mental pressure that overwhelms every sense. It's just that this new medication has kick-started your brain, but it feels more out of focus than ever. The medicine means that your mind is working at nearly full capacity for the first time in years. Your head is suddenly clearer than ever, your thoughts sharper than they have been in a long time, but you can't seem to connect at all with the outside world. You can see it-- in every book or newspaper you read, every film you see, every record you buy, every stranger's face. The outside world-- and all the things twisting underneath, all the traces of history and false selves, mangled meanings and bargains made with life-- and everything wants to connect with everything else inside your skull. There are so many things in your brain all at once, so much noise, so many words, and you can't seem to communicate what you mean to anyone. A room full of televisions all with the volume turned up full. Your head thrumming with an urgency and no known goal. It's all too much, ideas forming and then being interrupted halfway through by other ideas, everything colliding and compounding into a complicated ball of yammering, screaming, aching, _thoughts_. You have to stare into space for seconds at a time in order to untangle even one thing from the chaotic mass when someone asks you a question or tries to hold a conversation.

This is why you drank, to slow all this down, to make it easier to pull the jumbled thoughts out from under each other and set them up somehow neater, easier to manage. Now the world around you is overwhelmed by the clamouring in your head and it's so much harder to talk, so much harder to interact with the outside, so much harder to get onstage and remember “first finger goes on fret three, now fret ten, now fret two,” so much harder to not recede into the darkness of the tour bus to smoke and think. Harder to talk to your friends about everything inside you when every room you step in already feels heavy with the burden of you. What's easy is reading, watching films, and writing writing writing writing. Trying to figure out how to express the mangled thoughts inside you, how to put everything you've seen and consumed and experienced together and find _something_ from it, something better and less convoluted than the pseudo-religion they've been force-feeding you for the past six weeks, something you can understand. You don't know whether this is ego death or something else, this space of crisis, this obsession with your own lack of knowledge, this fervor, your own desperation for some central point, something you can make sense of.

It's been hard to let anyone touch you since you got out of hospital. Six weeks of having little to no agency over your own body, six weeks of scheduled bed times and med times and group therapy and meals. You built walls when you were in treatment; you had to, otherwise they would have taken everything. Getting all that back, reclaiming your self, with clear and racing mind included, means that the fear of someone taking yourself from you again is uncalled for but constant, and any physical contact sparks it higher. At first Nicky hugs you and keeps close to you the way it's always been, keeping up the casual physical contact your friendship has always consisted of. But he notices your flinches, your constant guard, your reticence, and slowly he moves away, until he only gets close to you in order to lift your shirt before bed and check that you haven't cut yourself tonight. Even hugging your family feels uncomfortable and strange, but you try not to let it show. Letting fans get anywhere near you is right out, so you keep small and to the shadows where you once posed and preened in the light. And hiding away keeps you from having to talk, keeps you from having to try and separate everything happening in your head into answers and replies. Hiding away means you can think without having to try and explain yourself, when no one wants to know the real answers anyway.

So you stay on the tour bus and hibernate in your bunk when you're not onstage or in a hotel. Your corner of the bus is dim-- the medication makes your eyes sensitive to light-- and stuffed with books. The rush of touring makes your head hurt; a different city every night, long hours of stale, cramped, isolated stillness interrupted by the terrifying, feedback-heavy adrenaline of gigs, Nicky micro-managing your attempt at a recovery eating schedule, fans screaming your own ripping words back at you, watching the sun come up from your hotel room window without knowing what day it is. The vacuum of space reduced to your own surroundings. Your spine and gut constantly seethe with a stressed out, muffled, hateful anger that you cannot find the source of. You can't have alcohol anymore to help you sleep and dull your awful dreams, so you drink black coffee until you shake and chain-smoke under the vent or out a window, staying awake until your body gives out and forces you into dreamless unconsciousness. You spend most of your time wrapped in a fuzzy blanket you picked up somewhere, trying to find comfort in its warmth, trying to disappear into the softness, to cover yourself and forget that you have a form under the folds of cloth. You have been asked by journalists and doctors alike if you think you are at risk for suicide. And while you have been low-level suicidal for years, you don't think you could do it. Not yet, not really. You reached a shrilling precipice before, but shied away from that edge, overwhelmed. The idea of vanishing forever, of going away to somewhere else, of all of this stopping, is so beautiful. You know you can take pain, but sometimes death is like a gentle fantasy in the back of your mind. It's a comfort. It's tempting. But not while you're still willing to try. Not while there's still a possibility that something they've given you might work, might help. You mark off the days, rating them, an idea suggested by someone –you can't remember who, now-- and it starts out strong. But things start to wobble, and the stress and confusion and rapid-fire highs and lows feel too much like a reflection of yourself and it's starting to take its toll. You are tired of not being able to speak the correct language, you are tired of not being certain what city you're in, you are tired of nights bleeding into days screaming into nights, you are tired of people watching you, you are tired of never knowing what's going on, you are tired of being unable to sleep, you are tired of being so isolated without ever being alone. You want to go hide under the porch like a dying animal.

Playing every other night makes your bones ache. It makes your head hurt. Your ears ring regardless of whether you are onstage or off. And you don't know whether it was created by your own anger-poisoned words, or the Priory's digging up of your old religious confusion, or something else entirely, but it feels as though there is something terrible inside you, something that needs to be starved out. You feel impure, unclean, and guilty guilty guilty, like there is something dirty inside you clinging to your ribs, as though in expressing all of your rage and disgust and disillusionment with the world you have irrevocably stained yourself and those around you, as if something inside you is cracked and cannot be fixed, and now you are forced to see the world like this, forced to experience everything simultaneously turned up to fever pitch and muffled with echoing distance. You can't stand the sensation of your own body, the knowledge of your skin and bones and everything in between and around them. You can't eat; you feel ill at the idea of food, the sight and smell makes you nauseous, the idea of something going inside you when all you want is to be empty makes you shudder. You can only handle one thing inside you at a time, and your mind is so full of so many words images ideas theories questions that anything inside your body makes you feel impure. And you want so badly to be pure; you want so badly for some single, perfect, immaculate answer to everything inside of you. You want so badly to feel that final emptiness, the sharp cleanness that comes with truth, with control. You want to feel unblemished, for once.

It's been half a month and the first European leg of the tour is done, but there's no time to stop and rest-- you still have to do the UK leg. Being back in the UK is somewhat relieving; you know the language, you know the names of towns, you know where you belong. Still, you're rushing, new city every day, Newcastle-Norwich-Wolverhampton-Cambridge, Nottingham-Exeter-Cardiff-Cork, the names change and the venues change but the dressing rooms don't, the rider doesn't, the erratic start-stop routine doesn't, your own aching head doesn't. You end up repeating yourself, _No, Nick, I'm fine. No, you can go watch footie in the hotel. I'll be alright here on the bus. I'm just going to read, you know, it's quiet in here. I'll see you later._ You love Nicky, love all your friends, but they overwhelm you with their speed and the ability they have to do so many things all at once without a worry. And you're sat here on the bus thinking about how it seems as if there's some fundamental thing to life that you're just not understanding. You wish you could feel calm because, technically, you're home, in the UK not Europe not Japan not Thailand. But your mind and your veins are still pulsing, still constantly coming back to some overwhelming unknown with an impossible answer, some sort of urge to find a truth, a universal meaning, a something that you can cling to that isn't god. The inability to turn your head off is maddening, and your thoughts end up circling horribly. You feel as though there's something missing, something you desperately want, but there's just a blank space when you search for an answer. There's a gnawing at your brain that wasn't there before you went into the hospital; suddenly you've been made aware that the desperation you thought you knew the source of is wider than you thought. You used to blame it on the psycho-social violence of a capitalist society, but it's deeper than that, something inside you and maybe in everyone else too. Something you don't know, can't express, and you've read everything you can get your hands on, so what is it you don't know?

The anxiety in your chest builds as you travel across England, and you can't catch even a moment of sleep. You're exhausted, but there's nothing but tension and insomnia flowing through your veins. Nicky has been eyeing you worriedly for days now, checking your skin more frequently. Honestly, you don't blame him, because the need to break skin is growing, the feeling that something bad might happen if you don't, the feeling that doing so might release you of your sins. You want to turn beads of blood into a rosary. And here, as well, your feeling of impurity picks up, a fever pitch. You feel like a traitor to your friends, to your morals, to your own past self. You never meant for the little things you used to maintain control, the habits you used to cope, to take over. You never meant to turn out like this. You never meant to go this far, and now you can't stop. They've taken so much from you; you always said you'd do what you want to no matter what others try to make you do or believe. But now you're sitting in the back of the bus with slogans from Alcoholics Anonymous in your suitcase and a card with a tour schedule around your neck, an eating regimen in Nicky's diary and a newly resurrected religious confusion circling its way through all of your thoughts. You can't figure out whether you are still in Hell or if you've somehow staggered your way into Purgatory. You can't tell if it's sin or mud clogging your veins. You feel loose. You need control.

In Sheffield, you have an extra day before the gig. Normally, you'd hole up in your bunk and read or watch your films and smoke until Nicky complained, but this time you go out into the streets with your shoulders hunched. You feel on constant alert when you're outside, irrationally paranoid and frightened of people. You always tell interviewers the hasty explanation that there's just never enough time on a tour to learn a city, but now it truly is a lie-- you'd rather just stay away from everyone and keep yourself to yourself. In a salon, you get your hair cut and dyed, despite the fact that the feeling of being manhandled –even just for a haircut-- makes you feel tense and panicked. You reflection looks back at you with a reddish fringe and it's not you from the Priory and that's all you care about. On the bus later, Nicky says you look like David Bowie, and it's the first time in months that you've received a compliment and not wanted to deny it outright. After your haircut, you find a tattoo parlour mentioned once by a fan. Folded in your coat pocket are three separate designs, which you unfold and smooth out on the counter. The artist looks at them, at you. _All three of these? All at once? I can do it, I just want to be certain that's what you want._ You nod, and follow him back to his station.

You find yourself in the chair for nearly three hours, absolutely revelling in the feeling. You always tell people that getting your tattoo hurt, but with the prolonged contact of the needle comes a sharp, euphoric sort of burn that you don't mention. It's good enough as a substitute for the urges that have been building inside you for weeks. You can feel the embers of anxiety in your chest cooling, and by the end of the session you're down five hundred pounds but your brain is screaming a little less. Whatever impending doom it had decided on has been postponed by the needle.

Back home, at the gig in Cardiff, you know people will want to see you, speak at you, be with you, scrutinize you. So you make sure to set up your dressing room full of as much camouflage netting as possible; not just for the metaphor or the atmosphere, but so you can hide away in the furthest recesses of the room and people who want to see you must navigate their way in the dim light to confront your body which you know probably looks so distant from your mind. Some poke their heads in the door and back away once they take in the low light and the fabric hung up across the walls. You feel better when it's just yourself, the rest of the band, your tour manager, and Kevin, the photographer who has followed you often through your tours. In conversation, you manage to goof off with him a little bit, sat in the lotus position on the floor of the dressing room, making jokes about the music industry and the word “humility” written across your fingers. You drink so much coffee your head feels like it's vibrating, anxiety shooting across your ribs and into your throat. And honestly here more than ever you want a drink because it feels like the end but you know there's still two and a half more months to go and you're not sure how you're going to survive it all without something to keep your mind from spinning and your body from slipping away from itself.

You have a week off in between the UK tour and going back to Europe, and by the time you're boarding the plane back to Germany, you hardly remember any of it. You spend the break drifting off into gyres of thought for hours, losing time and place until the phone rings or your body suddenly catches up with you. Once you've realigned yourself, you can barely remember what you were thinking about in the first place. Trying to place yourself in time. The idea that every person is just a chain of histories, and how much of your history is why you feel such disgust and confused doubt? The sick feeling of malice at the sight of your own skin. The difference and similarity between the martyrous fasting of saintly women and the starving girls who write to you. That look on the somnambulist's face when he wakes and sees the terrible future, the horror of desire and control. What happens when the world turns into pop culture and eats itself. Rimbaud said action isn't life, just a way of ruining a kind of strength; can you choose inaction? Is that what this is? If you fold everything back into itself, will it devour itself to the bare scaffolding bones? Obsessions with the smallest details, picking everything apart to find its components. Intolerable fixation. You hate it. Books and films and music help distract, but at any moment it could trigger a rabbit hole under your feet for you to fall down, digging yourself conceptually and ideologically and philosophically deeper every moment.

And then you are in Europe again, repeating yourself. When you're not curled in your bunk on the bus, you're pacing back and forth in the walkway, blanket round your shoulders and cigarette clenched between your fingers. Sleep never seems to come anymore; you stay awake for days, and every sunrise is accompanied by the sensation of everything inside you becoming fragile and tense, glass so tight and cold it's nearly screaming. You feel on edge, paranoid and watched. The guys in Suede are nice enough, but you can see them eyeing you like you're volatile, like you're something mysterious, wary of approach. And honestly, you're not sure if you want people to talk to you anyway, but you would really love it if they'd stop looking at you like that. Their stares go through your body, and you find yourself aware of individual locations and organs, the rest of you numb while your brain pinpoints on your left leg, or your lungs, or the fingers of your right hand. The crowd each night feels like a courtroom full of eyes fixing you with a meaning you don't have and a guilt you don't want. You mark off your days like you did at the first half of the tour, but by the end of the night nearly all of them end up unequivocally shit, and your numbers get lower and lower.

In Milan you become obsessed with your left hand. Your left hand, your left hand, your left hand-- fingers, palm, nails, wrist, veins, carpals, metacarpals, callouses and creases. You chew on your nails until there's nothing left, then you gnaw at the knuckles and teethe at the webbing between your thumb and forefinger until it's raw and red. You don't want this hand. You want to break your fingers like that guitarist from Def Leppard. You don't want to have to play guitar anymore, when you've never been good in the first place. You just bring James' talent down. It's selfish of you to want to play. It's selfish of you to not want to play. It's selfish of you to expect him to be patient with you or teach you, especially now. You should know all these chords already; you shouldn't have to re-learn them every single night. You hate playing guitar. You hate this hand that's just another example of your failure. Your fingers are useless and stupid; you're useless and stupid.

In Madrid, you're in a supermarket about to buy shampoo and cigarettes, flexing your fingers and feeling the dry and blemished skin crackle when you move, and impulsively you buy a knife. A big one, so you can see your distorted reflection in it, and because it's dramatic, and you're nothing if not a drama queen. When you get back to the bus, you're not sure what to do with it; flay your hand into ribbons, chop off your fingers, gouge a massive hole in the centre of your palm to get at the crawling inside you, like _Un Chien Andalou_. Some crew member whose name you honestly never bothered to learn finds you staring contemplatively into the metal shine, and you can't even be bothered to fight him off when he takes it from your barely responsive grip and yammers at you about how it's not worth it and what are you doing and why do I have to deal with this and I do not get paid enough for your psycho bullshit and my god this knife is massive and what were you planning on doing with this never mind I don't want to know. Nicky learns about it later, sits down across from you in your Hotel Ibis and asks _Why?_ and you don't know how to tell him your body is ruined and disgusting, how you don't want these hands anymore; they're talentless and stained with horrible words and nicotine and dirt. Instead you shake your head and try to talk but it comes out fragmented, almost poetic but not quite. It's like when you tried to explain yourself when you were first were admitted into the hospital, how every word felt inadequate and incomplete to explain any single one of your feelings or intentions. You wish you could talk with Nick like you used to, you wish you could make him understand. _I'm sorry,_ you try again. _I can't explain. I wanted my fingers gone._ It's the best you can come up with.

You hate this because you genuinely love your friends. They've known you since you were seven, and somehow they've never gotten tired of you. Somehow they've always had the strength to support you and worry about you. And you will always, always be grateful for that, even if you have no idea how to show it. You love James for trying to understand your lyrics, for patiently teaching you, for phoning you every week in hospital. You love Sean for visiting you, for buying you records, for debating playfully with you, for never trying to force you to cheer up. You love Nicky for writing with you, for being your best mate, for always calling you smart or talented instead of beautiful, for putting up with your bullshit, for staying by your side. You adore them all. You wish you could tell them that. You wish they could understand that you're not doing any of this out of dislike for any of them; you're not doing any of this on purpose. You just can't seem to internalize their love; you cannot reconcile your own self-hate with the unbroken support they have given you. You wish there was something you could do or say that would make them understand just how much you appreciate them despite your collapsing mind. Instead, you sit there in the dark at four in the morning and hope that somehow your thoughts reach them, even if you know things don't work that way.

A week later you're in France, joined by Simon Price, and part of you wants to crawl under the parked bus in Lyon and hide, while another part claws at your throat, wondering if maybe a journalist could parse out your thoughts, wondering how bad of an idea that is. You stay mostly silent, watching him watching you all. You know he'll want to talk to you, though, and you are simultaneously terrified and relieved.

In the dressing room in Lyon you pull on a formless white boiler suit, which you have slightly modified with some star patches and a big black felt tip pen. It helps to be less aware of your body when you're onstage. It means you're less uncomfortable, it means you can concentrate better. Onstage you stare at your hands to make sure they're doing what you want them to. Every so often, you catch Nicky or James' eye and they send you a nod, that you're doing it right, you're doing alright. The audience is practically unresponsive, and you all hurtle through the set, anxious to get off and out of the glare of the lights and the bemused stares. You are tired of performing yourself. After the show, it's Nicky and James that do the talking, leaving you to wander back to the bus and sit on your bunk and spiral. When James eventually comes to check on you, you're tearing an empty cigarette carton to pieces and staring off into middle distance. _Go to bed_ , he tells you, and eventually you do, but you can feel everyone's eyes on you as you shuffle off the bus and make your way up the walk into your hotel, into your room. Nicky, when you get inside, is already passed out on the other bed, blankets pulled up past his shoulders and one hand hanging off the side of the mattress. You climb into your own bed but, unsurprisingly, you can't sleep. Your thoughts are whirling and even if they weren't you know the nightmares would still be there. You pass the time listening to Nicky breathe and staring at the strip of red light slipping through the curtains to streak across the ceiling from a blinking neon sign outside. It feels like your insides are aching, you can't stop thinking about how weak you are, how forty-five people died in a Phillipine earthquake not a week ago and you're sat here obsessed with your own stupid flaws and questions. But there are so many questions, and you can't understand this world, and that's all you want to do, all you've ever wanted to do, is _understand_. Situationism's not enough, you're trying to scream in people's faces but they don't get your words, and it feels like that pain when your skin is so cold it's numb and then you run your hand under hot water-- something under the nerves, a sensation without sense. You lay in bed and spiral, wishing you could wake Nicky up to talk, but he wouldn't understand what you were thinking about and you wouldn't know how to explain to him all the crowded thoughts and ideas overlapping themselves inside you.

In Paris you speak more than you've spoken this whole tour, and it feels like an odd sort of bloodletting. Wandering around the Montparnasse Cemetery, looking for Eugene Ionesco's grave, you chat with Simon about Sartre. Still in the same boiler suit, but with a knitted parka on top, you let yourself be photographed and can't decide whether to laugh or wince when the guys heckle you. You know how goddamn vain and ridiculous you are, how stupid these obsessions are, but you can't help it and your skin feels wrong under the cloth. You find yourself and your actions absurd, but you're painfully aware of the self-hate that sits firmly in your gut and climbs up your spine and into your skull at every opportune moment. Descending into the Catacombs feels metaphorically apt, but it's almost worse than your visits to Hiroshima and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. These graves are full of bones, and while you've always been good with history, this suddenly puts the deaths in Germany and in Japan starkly in perspective. If this is the Empire Of The Dead, what is the rest of the world, of history? You try to avoid imagining how many more bones are under German soil, how many were turned to ash, just so you keep from having a panic attack. As the photo equipment is set up, you stare at a row of skulls behind you. You feel like Dante speaking to the dead one by one, or Odysseus with his offerings of blood speaking to shades of the underworld. _Look, Tom,_ you tell the photographer, _I don't mind, as long as I don't have to touch them_. That, and as long as you don't have to give the camera confrontational, come hither looks like you used to. You can't do that anymore.

After the shoot is done you trail behind the others as you all journey upward towards purgatory. All these bones lining the walls. And no one knows who they were, anymore. Life is so temporary. You walk up to one wall and rap your knuckles gently against the temple of one skull. It echoes, and it sounds like it's laughing. All the bones seem to be watching you, a judgmental memento mori and they are whispering to you that in time, everyone is lost to bone. You wish you were lost to bone. Skeletons don't care what they look like, who they are, they aren't terrified of the future, they don't feel wrong in themselves, they aren't concerned with so many eyes watching. Death is the universal neutralizer; death utterly disappears life's problems from life. It's inevitable, and all you have any semblance of control over is how, when, and where. You stop again, stare into the hollow gaze of one skull, and kiss it. You smile a little. You and the skulls, it's your little secret.

There's a power outage on the bus when you get back from the show, and while everyone else is grumbling about torches and backup generators, you're quite pleased. Less light means less stimuli, which means it's so much easier to think. You tell James to find Simon, because you know he wants to talk. And you know it will be infinitely easier in the dark.

Your talk with Simon goes better than expected. It's the first time in months that a journalist has engaged you in _conversation_ while interviewing you instead of making it a question-and-answer session. Simon gives you his own opinion, his own input, and responds to your thoughts, allowing you to clarify yourself or expand on an idea. For once, you are willing to talk, because you can see that he is listening, and you can see that he is keeping up. He asks you about all the things that are so close to the surface right now, as if he can see them all scratching just under your skin, but it's okay. You can talk about all the thoughts stuffing your brain and confusing you. You can talk about treatment. All the things that you've torn out of yourself and put into your lyrics, all the ragged edges still inside you that haven't healed. You'll be as honest as you can; you really do want to talk, if someone will listen, if you're not afraid of tiring them or burdening them like you have done with Nicky all these months. _People think the minute you check out, everything's okay,_ you tell him _Which it's not. At all. I've got a good smile._ You smile for him, your 'everything's fine and good!' smile, your 'I'm living for today!' smile, your 'I'm happy joyous and free!' smile; you're good at hiding for the people who don't really want to see.

You ramble a little, a lot. About your time in treatment, about your paranoia that people think you're stupid, about how weak you are apart from the fact that you know you can take more pain than most, about philosophy, about the media. _I know it's vain,_ you say when Simon asks you about tattoos, about the cuts, _but I don't think it's to do with loving the body. It's to do with detesting the body._ All the different ways to get away from yourself. It's about finding that point in the act of mutilation that let's you slide right out of your head and your body and into the pain so you're not aware of anything else but the euphoric sharpness and the buzz in your ears and in your head. It's about looking at the gash in your skin and feeling strong and stoic for the first time in weeks. You don't say that, though. It's too much. It's about control-- which is what Simon says next, and you have to agree. _When I was in Whitchurch..._ You start, but that's getting too close, too personal, and maybe here isn't the place to reveal that in Whitchurch no one tried to force you to eat, no one really watched you, so at meal times you could dump your food in the trash and no one cared, you could find a paper clip or bit of metal to gouge at your skin with; at Whitchurch you clung to control with your fingertips, and at the Priory they tore it away from you. _People can't actually hold you down and force food into your mouth. They just can't do it. And someone can't be near you 24 hours a day to stop you doing something to your body. And ultimately they've got no right to anyway, because it is your body._ And you wish you could regain that control, that purity. You wish you could find some truth in that control, some sort of answer, because this discussion, this is not it. This is just digging at what's flying through your head at any given moment, just throwing salt in a wound you've been picking at for weeks.

You thought maybe a journalist would help you sort it all out, but it's just rehashing everything you've been thinking about, and nothing is any clearer. You wish you could talk more, wish you could just say everything that's in your head, but microphones are not your friend, and Simon is nice but journalists are not a type you should trust with your messy brain and your personal confusion. You leave Simon with a William Blake line, a deleted stanza from his poem “The Fly”, about the inevitability of death and the futility of forgiving whatever may kill you. He thanks you, shakes your hand, and leaves to go out on the town with James. You stumble from the bus to your hotel room, where Nicky is already sleeping off his earlier antics. Simon has unwittingly started you picking apart every thought and theory you have, sorting and compounding and trying to find something perhaps buried inside. You told him your thoughts, but what else is there? Do you really believe everything you've just said? You must do, you've got to. But what if there's something wobbly in there? The point is control, has always been control, autonomy, a body you won't shy away from, a body that can withstand your mind, a mind that can withstand itself. What happens if you start picking at it all? You're still awake and thinking when it's time to leave for the Netherlands, but Nicky has to call your name and shake your shoulder gently where you sit staring out the window, bits of torn up hotel stationary scattered around you.

On the bus everyone is quiet. Sean is playing his Gameboy, headphones tight over his ears. James looks like he's torn between punching something and crawling under one of the bunks. Even Nick has his feet up, arms crossed over his chest as he stares dully at the ceiling of the bus. You are smoking out of the window and watching them all and wishing you didn't know that you were the cause of a good deal of their melancholic mood. There is a feeling of dread sitting on your solar plexus that makes it difficult to breathe right, an anxiety that radiates up the back of your neck and down into your fingers. Your veins itch. When you reach Amsterdam you stock up on cigarettes and light up almost as soon as you get back to the bus. Nicky makes a face at the way the smoke drifts near him but honestly you can't care right now because all you want is for the hollow, aching feeling to leave you, the feeling like something is going wrong and you can do nothing to stop it.

The show that night is terrible. James' strings break multiple times, Nicky's bass stops working, James forgets words or stumbles over them, and you all have to start over multiple times. You feel twitchy and uncomfortable. The crowd is unresponsive; they don't even hate you enough to heckle you. You all trip through the set as fast as possible to get away from the stare of the lights and the indifference of the audience. James looks angry, Sean seems frustrated, Nicky looks morose, and you still feel like the world is crumbling in your sternum.

You stumble to a toilet at the backstage of the venue while the others are sat staring at the floor in the dressing room and stare at yourself in the dirty mirror, the feral, desperate expression on your face gone loose and sharp and you can't look at your own reflection you make yourself sick so you lock yourself in a stall. You wish you could vomit but there's nothing in you to throw up. The doomed feeling is mounting and you can feel yourself start to shake and you need it gone you need it gone so you dip your fingers into your pocket. You could feel the terrible wrongness growing when you got to the venue, so you bought a packet of razors from some random Dutch market and slipped them into your back pocket for safety, for emergencies. You know Nicky's going to check you later but you don't care anymore. No, you do care, but you know it doesn't matter, you know you need this relief. What's Nicky going to do, anyway-- what can anyone do to you now? Send you back to treatment-- you know it doesn't work. Force you to go home-- and then what? You need this, right now. You just need everything to stop screaming at you stop being so loud and so much stop making you think all the time stop making you feel watched all the time stop making you feel like some unknown atrocity is about to occur stop making you feel like absolute desperate shit all the time stop just stop. The cold metal touches your chest where everything is collapsing and you are suddenly focused-- it doesn't hurt like people think.

Self-mutilation like this is always a chaotic mass of contradictions inside of you. It hurts, but not the type of pain where you want to stop. Your actions are always simultaneously aggressive slashes and precise, calculated strokes. The pain, the blood, the action, all of it somehow allows you to both return to your body and remove yourself from it; you are focused in tightly on this one section of skin, this sharp, tingling, painful, semi-euphoric sensation, so that you're outside of the rest of you, it doesn't matter any longer, you are this one stretch of incised skin and the sensations inside it. The deeper the cut, the more your stomach somersaults euphorically, the top of your head tingling. All of the dread, all of the anxiety that has been building, rushes out of you with the pain and the blood and you're calm, you can breathe again and you feel alright, you feel _good_.

You sit on the closed toilet with your head back and breathe, feeling a calm distance wash over you, the heautoscopic comfort born from the mutilation of the flesh. You can see yourself from outside yourself, sat with your hair over your face and your eyes closed, expression glazed, blood following the trail of your sternum and beginning to flow more heavily down your body. You sit up, uncertain of how long it's actually been. Once you've dabbed a little at the blood with a handful of toilet paper, you flush it down and pull your black t-shirt back on. You wash your hands, have a smoke in the hallway while the muffled sounds of Suede onstage echo through the place, then return to the dressing room. _They really are good,_ you comment, jerking your head in the direction of the stage and sitting down in one of the makeup chairs next to Nick, _Better than we were at their age. At least their Richard can actually play guitar._ It is a little funny, you think, both guitarists named Richard, but one can play his instrument and is barely even twenty, the other is a mess of disintegrating words and cracking parts at nearly twenty-seven.

You fall silent when Nicky frowns at you, eyeing you up. You can see the worry in his eyes and you didn't want this, you just wanted to feel better. _Rich, come here, let's have a look at you,_ he says gently, and you do as you're told without dishonesty; you know there's no point in hiding it. You stand passively with your hands at your sides as Nick pulls your shirt up-- it stings a little where the blood has dried and stuck to the cloth. _Fuck!_ you hear James exclaim, snapping you alert so quickly your neck cracks when you jump and turn to look at him, _Nick, this one's bad. He's gonna need stitches again_. You wish you'd never gotten used to people talking about you like you're not there. But really, you're not, half the time.

Sean and James are talking quietly on the other side of the room and Nicky's hand presses against the side of your neck, bringing your attention back to him. _Why have you done this, Rich? Why?_ And you can see that he genuinely wants to know. You genuinely want to tell him, but words are failing you, and describing something like this when your grasp on language is shaky is not easy. _I feel alright now_ , is all you can manage to say.

Sean informs you all that there are journalists scheduled to come once Suede has left the stage. Nicky sighs heavily and drops your shirt. Watching their anxiety, their hurried discussion, you almost feel bad through the buzzing distance the cut has provided you. But right now the dread is gone, everything is padded behind a layer of unfocused space and you feel okay, and that's what matters. You are utterly pliant as Nicky leads you up the stairs and out of the venue, into a taxi and into the A&E of some Dutch hospital. Nicky chews on his fingers the whole time you're sat waiting, and stares at you with some sort of helpless hurt on his face. You don't know how to explain that the pain shuts off the babbling thoughts for a little while, that it all goes silent for an hour or two while you are somewhere sideways from yourself, not needing to think. In the hotel, the centre of your chest newly stitched and stinging, he sits with you for hours to try and understand. And you do, you try to tell him, but it feels like you're back in Whitchurch, trying to think through the sedation and through your own brain, trying to explain the feelings and reasons inside you that have no equivalent words: _Nick, it makes me feel so good – It's just that nothing else works, it feels like something is wrong until I do it sometimes – It means I can get out of my body and get in control again – It's like a punishment, to get the purity back, to get...never mind – It takes away everything bad so I don't have to worry so much about all the little things – It lets me exist in my head again, for a little while – It puts pain and feeling back where it should be – I feel alright, now, it's okay._ But you can see he's confused and upset and annoyed at you for ruining everything and on the verge of tears and it's so, so hard for you to explain.

Time seems to speed up, suddenly, and you find yourself slipping into voids of thought or distracted circles of idea-deconstructing in order to protect yourself from the way everyone is looking at you, from the way everyone is judging you. And you know that now everyone is watching you even more closely than before. There are only so many ways to get away from the panopticon of your friends, the crew, the press, the fans, everyone's eyes on you and you feel like everyone is waiting to take away your control. You restrict yourself even more firmly to the hotel, the bus, or the venue, rarely straying out into the cities for anything more than cigarettes, which are generally well-stocked on the bus anyway. Every gig is two hours wishing you were someplace else. Every hour awake is desperation for sleep, wishing you didn't exist so you wouldn't have to think all the time. In Belgium, you smash your guitar in frustration and realize that now it is the closest thing to cutting or alcohol that you can find and people won't question you, won't look at you sideways, won't threaten to lock you up. In the dressing room you pick at a spot on your arm where a snapping string broke the skin. In Copenhagen you read an interview in the NME with the band Dub War, who toured with you a year or two ago. They seemed like alright guys, but your name and Nicky's comes up and all it is, is slagging you off-- you and Nick swanned about Blackwood like pretentious movie stars, you're faking your problems, you never drank as much as you say you did, you're all dramatic freaks. And a year ago you would have laughed and mocked it and known that you can slag off other bands twice as hard, but right now all you can think of is everyone watching you and how badly you want a drink. But maybe-- maybe you were faking it, maybe that makes it even more your fault that everything is falling apart. You are angry at them for making you question yourself, angry at yourself for being a wasted nuisance. That night you smash your guitar and fling your unused mic stand across the stage, barely missing James before stalking back to the dressing room.

And in Norway you find yourself shaking again, needing to find some sort of control, something you know you can do that everyone else can't, something that will tell you that you still have a grip on your mind and on your body. After the show James is out drinking and Nicky has swanned off to the hotel with relief in the set of his shoulders to call his wife, and you're sat in your pants on the bus, knowing that there's no way you can even try to get an hours' worth of sleep before it's time to be shipped off somewhere else. And your body is starting to feel like it's sliding away from itself, so you say fuck it and go out in the November cold in your pants and the thin cardigan you're wearing because at least the sensation of freezing is different from the numbness or the feeling of falling.

The guitarist from Suede-- the other Richard-- finds you sat on the side of a brick planter and smiles at you and he just looks so young and sweet. _Aren't you absolutely bloody freezing?_ He sits down beside you and you shrug. _Yes, but I want to be._ You want to be cold because it's something you can control-- tell your body not to feel it, tell your body not to shake, mind over matter, a physical punishment, just a cold version of the razor. _Okay,_ he nods, and you both stare over at the buses in silence, _Are you enjoying the tour, then?_ You nod-- like you said to Simon, you have a good smile-- and show him the dates you've rated above a seven on your little laminated card. He comments on each, and god he's just a teenager, he must be loving this tour. _This must be amazing for you_ , you tell him, thinking of your own teenage optimism that even back then was tinged with the skeptical critique of a historian so different from this smiling kid, _You're right out of school and you've got your whole life ahead of you and you get to travel about in this successful band. You get to see the world and be famous and you're not even twenty._ You've seen him onstage, and he seems like he's having the time of his life, and he's _good_. He confirms your thoughts enthusiastically, and you talk a little more, but then it's time to go and James has come back and is chatting with some Suede's road crew and suddenly there are more people out here than you can handle, so you go back on the bus and revel in the way your skin feels cadaver-cold and red compared to the heated air inside.

Wrapped in a massive parka that hides your body, you give an interview to a television station in Stockholm. You've never been a big fan of television segments; they make you self-conscious, hyper aware of your voice and your body and your bad skin. You answer the interviewer's questions, but you are watching yourself from a distance. _My lyrics speak about the world as it actually is_ , you hear yourself say. And you know it's true, and you know you want people to think, but you also know that now that you've seen how the world truly is, lived it, been to its histories and seen its bones, you cannot close your eyes. Those ghosts and their stories run through you and there is so much there that it is hard to sleep. _Every day of my life_ , you say, _I feel I'm not as great a writer as I could be, I'm not as intelligent as I could be_. And isn't that the awful truth, your outside self sneers. That your mind is clear and you have so much time but you've lost the ability to express yourself. No one understands what you want to say anymore. Who knows if they even really want to. _The only thing that's different about me from six months ago is that I don't use drugs and I don't drink. Everything else I think and believe in is unquestionably the same._ And the part of you watching is laughing at you, laughing because even now you are questioning every word as soon as it falls out of your mouth, even now you are dissecting every belief you've ever had, trying to find something substantial after it's all been ripped away from you.

And you say you've found a different way of dealing with your problems, but solutions do not miraculously appear, no solution has stuck, the NHS medications opened the floodgates of your mind and the Priory confused you and you are clinging to dirty roots on the rushing banks of a muddy shore with bloodied, weakened hands. You want to laugh when the interviewer asks the reason for you breakdown, because can't they see there is no reason? That it's just you, that you're just fundamentally damaged for some reason? That you don't know how to live in the world without every single thing bruising you? It's not about being in the band, or being a writer, or being Welsh, or whatever-- it's just that there is something inside of you that is maladapted, that cannot function in life like everyone else. It's just you.

It's a strangely clarifying moment-- when he asks you if you have a dream of settling down with a family-- and suddenly you know exactly what you want at that moment. You desperately want to be able to explain yourself, to encapsulate everything that you are and everything that you think and everything that has made you. _I have a dream of writing a lyric which I think is…flawless, really-- that I think that's got no broken edges, that makes sense to me. Not anybody else, but just makes sense to me-- that I think in fifteen to twenty lines sums up exactly how I feel about everything, not just today, how I've felt all my life._ You want to be able to make people understand, but they never will. You are starting to truly see that now. So if you could only make yourself understand, if you could glean some sort of truth or answer from everything you've consumed for nearly twenty-seven years, that would be success, for you. Even that, though, feels nearly impossible.

After the gig in Hamburg, you're sat in the hotel with your arms curled over your knees, watching Nicky sleep through the light coming from the window, quietly feeling yourself teetering. For weeks now, you've been trying to parse out some sort of something from everything you've learned and unlearned and relearned, everything that has been stirred up inside of you. And all you've been able to feel is trapped, incapable, scarred, and confused. For weeks now you've barely been able to sleep, no matter how desperate you are for it. For weeks now you've felt that subconscious, self-conscious, hateful second self come back stronger and louder than ever. A corner of your head that you drowned with drink and with drugs and with razors that is now laughing at you, judging you, hating you every second of every day. Makes you want to crawl out of your own skin. Makes you wish you could stop existing just for a little while, just so you could sit in silence for a bit. Instead, here you are, insomniatic, craving a cigarette, watching Nick's slumbering figure, hating yourself, feeling disgusting, feeling lost, feeling the knife-edge of not existing inching ever forward and you just want to look down.

Cigarette. Lighter. Cigarette. Lighter. Shaking hands. Inhale. Your feet are cold. You are cold. The brick wall scrapes against your shoulders. You miss your mam. You miss your dog. You miss sleep. Inhale. You wish you could have a drink. You feel trapped and everyone is watching you and waiting for you to fuck up. You don't want to prove them right but you're pretty sure they're right. Inhale. The cigarette isn't helping. You drop it on the pavement and grind it out with your foot, forgetting you haven't got any shoes. It hurts. You don't care-- or maybe you care too much. You never could tell. You wish you weren't so terribly bruised and hurt. You wish you weren't so terribly numb. You wish you could feel things correctly. You wish you weren't so aware of all the horrible things in the world. You wish you didn't have a body. You wish you didn't have to be here. You miss being able to talk to your friends. You miss writing with Nicky. You miss being a child. You miss the familiarity of your flat. You want to go home. You want to go _home_. You want to go home you want to go home you want to go home you want to go home you want to go home you want to go home you want to go home you want to go home--

 _Rich. Richey. Richey, hey. Rich, focus on my voice, okay. Richey, please._ A hand comes between your face and the wall as you zero in on Nicky's soft lilt. He's clearly panicked but trying not to sound it, and you know it's because of you but you can't do anything about it because you just want to get out you want to go home you just-- you can't-- And, still talking quietly, Nick takes you gently by the arm, pulls you away from the wall so when you move again your head only hits his hand, and leads you stumbling and foggy back to your hotel room. Standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror as he wipes blood and grit and bits of clay from your skin, you stare dully at your own reflection and see nothing but a monstrous static looking back.

Nick puts you in bed and calls Martin, sat at the foot of your mattress and glancing back at you with terrified concern. You think he might be crying, or close to it, but every part of you feels muffled by the rushing white noise of too much going on inside you. You don't sleep but fall into a void of dissociation, sliding out into a white wall of nothing or into a strange march of repetitive, nonsensical words. The numbers on the digital clock by the bed say 7:15, and it must be morning, but numbers and time don't seem to be a concept your mind can grasp onto when all it wants is to stop feeling trapped, to stop feeling watched, to stop feeling wrong. You have no idea what time it is when Nicky kneels down to your level and informs you that you're all going home today, no matter what the label execs say.

The flight home is thick with silence. Once you're in the air, your cheek starts to sting and itch. You go to scratch at it, but Nicky, who is sat next to you, pulls your wrist down gently. _Don't scratch it, Rich,_ he mumbles, _It'll make it worse. Just leave it._ You do, for his sake, and because even though you feel caged sat here in this metal tube hedged in by seats and strangers, you're going back to Wales and that's what matters. You want to scratch, though, as punishment for worrying Nicky, for making them cancel the rest of the tour like you know they're going to, for making James and Sean's faces and minds so glum where you can see them sit in silence across the aisle. When you land, a van drives you back across the Severn into Wales and you can see the relief in Nicky's shoulders when you get into Cardiff.

The next three weeks, someone calls you every night. Usually Nicky, or James, or your parents. You talk to them but neither of you ever really know what to say, and you're never certain what it is they want to hear. You write, constantly, to try and unscramble your brains, to try and get some of your thoughts out on paper so maybe you can sort them all out and find some sort of solution inside of them. It feels like it isn't working.

In your last three concerts of the year, you rediscover the release of destroying guitars. Whatever has pent up inside of all of you since getting back from Europe, it starts to show at the Astoria. You all get nosebleeds every night from some sort of mysterious feedback problem, and it only cranks the frustration higher. Your whole being recoils from food, from sleep, from anything, and Nicky, frustrated at your refusal to follow the eating schedule that's been given to you, barely speaks onstage. Even the air in the venue feels raw and intense, the smell of metal and sweat lancing through the atmosphere. Somehow your side of the stage ends up being the one with the fog machine, and you are periodically enveloped in the the thick chemical smell of fake smoke, shielded from view. You love it, the feeling of vanishing. You play your guitar as best you can, one eye on your friends for reassurance, for comfort, for something, but all you can feel is their tension and nervousness bouncing straight back onto you, and everything feels like it's building. James jerks across the stage, and even his signature twirls seem like he's stabbing his body through the air. Sean's teeth are clenched tight behind his kit, his grip on his sticks knuckle-white, and Nicky is stiff and nervous. The first two nights feel like a fist clenching tighter and tighter around the stage, the words, your brain. The first night, at the end, you just drop your guitar on the stage and walk off, hateful of the thing; on the second you throw it across the stage by the strap and it barely misses James but doesn't break, so you pick it up again and throw it back to your side, where a technician grabs it before you can inflict any more damage.

On the third night, it feels like everyone is terrified. There is a knife hanging over every one of your heads and it seems like the audience can feel it. James is all tense muscles and aggression and power, and the audience reflects it, screaming your words back at you, pogoing up and down with fists raised and wide open mouths. When the lights flash across them it looks like a thousand screaming souls in Hell, crying out your words that you cannot understand for the feedback and static in your ears. You feel like your entire self is being stripped away up here, you are turning into some strange object in the eyes of everyone watching, in the eyes of your friends.

Everything, all of it, is overwhelming and you are angry at this year of pain and loss and you hate the way your own words rip at the tender parts of you and by the end you just want to control something, you want to make something else spin out into chaos the way you feel and James hasn't even reached the middle of the song yet but your guitar goes flying over your head and into the ground. Your nose starts bleeding again from the screeching feedback but you ignore it. You revel in the jolts through your arms every time the body of the guitar hits the stage, and you slam and scrape it against the floor until bits are flying off and then you drop it. On the other side of the stage, you can see Nicky has joined you in the destruction, smashing his bass to bits and kicking over monitors. You grab your useless mic stand and smash your forehead against the metal microphone grill over and over, like you could get your words out that way, like everyone would shut up and listen if you could just get it out right. You feel blood trickle into your eye and then the mic stand tips over so you kick it away and pick up your guitar again, intent on destroying it until there's nothing left of the hated thing. James is somehow still singing even though the rest of you have long since stopped playing and are busy annihilating everything behind him. Your guitar is in fragments, and all that's left is the neck, with just a few splintered bits attached, and you are hitting yourself over the head with it, again and again, trying to break your brain into fragments too. This obliteration, your own auto-destruction and the demolition of all your equipment, almost feels like happiness, because the need to feel something other than confusion, even if it's pain, even if it's a concussion, has suddenly come to a climax. You drop the bloodied piece of your guitar and stare at the only thing onstage not completely destroyed-- Sean's drum kit. He's standing behind it, watching you, but you have to take that leap, you have to feel it on your whole body, so you swan dive into the kit, feeling metal and plastic crash down around you, scraping your arms and bruising your ribs and you know without checking that your knee is bleeding. All of your equipment is in pieces and it feels amazing, like you've destroyed it all, like some sort of release, because it's all gone. Tomorrow you're twenty-seven and this shit year is almost over and everything has been obliterated. It feels like something is ending. You just want it all to be over.

Your ears ring for days afterward. Your twenty-seventh birthday is a mess of internal silence and noise.

Christmas is a peaceful oasis in all your mental and physical chaos. You sit on your parents' living room floor like you're a child, playing with Snoopy and feeling overwhelmed with the smell of pine. You exchange gifts and hugs and they pretend they don't see the grid-shaped scab on your face from the show. You go over to Nicky's flat and exchange gifts with him, too, and it feels for a moment like everything has gone back to normal. You shotgun scrawl poetic, rambling Christmas cards to friends and family that you're sure make no sense to anyone but yourself but you send them anyway. And then the holiday season is over and it's the new year and you are still clawing at the inside of your head, scrambling to make something out of everything inside of you, scrambling to find something universal inside your knowledge before-- before-- And time seems to be rushing through you, around you, you're thinking back and forth and history is here and the present is so far back and you have no idea what to make of anything anymore. So you sit on your sofa, as fireworks continue to explode across the water outside, and try to build some sort of refuge, something you can trust, something you can know for certain, something that isn't god or nature or death. You don't know how to find that truth you've been searching for, you don't know how to dig deep enough to find an answer or make anything make sense. When you blink, it's been days.

In the end, you realize there is no ultimate truth, there is no enlightenment, there is no reason for any of this at all, and you decide to reject everything. You sit on the floor in the middle of your living room, stared at by the collages of your inspirations and idols on the wall, and you sort through everything you've written since you left the hospital, shoving pages into a plastic bin bag. They're no good, they're looking at the wrong thing, looking for the wrong thing, aren't expressing what you want to say. You can't hang on to things that so blatantly struggle to be understood. You take the bag down the stairs to the pavement outside your apartment building and slowly dump the contents over the metal railing and into the water below. Things don't feel clearer, but they do feel lighter. Less clutter in your house means less clutter in your head. Still, the clamouring is there, trying to let itself be known, and you spend the next half week reading books, watching films, and scribbling in a notebook, rough draft versions of songs you can tell are closer to what you're trying to say. Closer, but not close enough.

You keep reading, watching, writing, refining, reducing, compounding, trying to express everything that you've ever felt, everything that's in your head, everything that has culminated in this complete rejection of all things. Over an utterly sleepless weekend, when you can't shut your eyes even for five minutes without a whirlwind of thoughts yanking them open again, you type up everything you've written that you deem good enough. You want to make this something the others can look at and _understand_ , something that can be looked at as a comprehensive whole, an attempt to explain yourself in words and pictures. You find an ugly Bugs Bunny binder you'd bought on impulse in London and paint over it, scratching ' _OPULENCE_ ' with the back of the paintbrush in the drying blood-red acrylic. The reason for the binder's existence, the reason you bought it, the thing you've decided to reject outright. You collect various collages and art and photographs scattered through the flat and bring them to the middle of the living room. Bits from your notebooks, collages, clippings from books, all go into the binder. You spend an evening with a pencil and paint and a Pritt stick, sketching faces and images that have been rolling in your head, pasting old and new things together and compiling it all. You feel like you are curating yourself, trying to distill everything that you are into this. By Monday morning you've slept less than three hours in as many days, and the binder is stuffed with words and images and ideas and quotes and lyrics. Hopefully putting all of this in one place can speak for you where your words are jumbled when you try on your own. Hopefully all this explains what you feel, what you're thinking, what's been crawling under your skin and raking at your brain for months, how you've come to see the world and its meaningless terrors since you left the Priory in August. You know it's getting harder for the others to understand what you've been trying to say, you know that your own brain is putting up walls between you, but maybe this will be good enough, maybe you've put enough information in here, maybe you've captured your squirming, fleeting thoughts down on solid paper well enough that they'll understand _this_.

You've been thinking, through all this, how awful it must be for your friends to have to worry about you all the time, for them to be unable to understand you or talk to you because you're too busy trying to unscramble the screaming mess in your head, for Nicky to have to check your body like a child, for James to have to pretend he's not drinking on the sly so you're not tempted, for Sean to try and talk you into a friendly game on the Sega only for you to wander distractedly away, unable to concentrate on the screen, for you to hide in the dark in your bunk while they worry about you. You vow to spend this week of rehearsals for the upcoming tour concentrating on making them happy, on connecting with them again, on making sure you're not in the way or causing problems.

In Surrey, you feel closer to happiness than you have in a long time. Nothing belongs to you here; you are utterly unconnected to your surroundings and somehow that makes it all seem lighter, cleaner. The weight of consumerism or belonging isn't hanging on you. Your only connections are to the words you're writing and the rest of the band. You borrow one of the sound technicians' library cards to take books out to read when you can't sleep. You play Sega with Sean and join the others in ragging on him for his consumerism. You banter with James, and let him teach you the chords to one of the lyrics Nicky's written. You cuddle on the sofa with Nicky and talk sport and talk books and watch him grin. You are genuinely excited to write a song for the new _Judge Dredd_ film, enough that you spend a night rereading Nietzsche to capture the Ubermensch aspect of the Street Judges and pouring your thoughts on religion and truth and self determination out on paper. You stop yourself from prodding Nicky awake to read them; you've annoyed him enough in the middle of the night, he deserves a rest from your racetrack of a brain. It's exhausting, keeping your own head at bay in order to properly interact with the world around you, but it's fucking worth it to see them smile at you for once instead of looking worried. You don't think about the fact that these rehearsals are gearing you up for yet another tour, in a country you've never cracked, for people you've always hated. You pretend it's just for the writing, just for the demos.

Your mind is fragmenting more and more into a never-ending choppy newsreel of ideas and images and half-formed sentences. You buy a disposable camera on impulse, something to cling to that captures moments and freezes them before they can slip away. You take a few photos of the guys laughing, playing video games, playing their instruments. Just a moment out of two decades of companionship and experience, forever freeze-framed, and it'll never be like that again. Nicky mocks you sweetly-- _Don't we have enough photographers taking our picture all the time?_ James chimes in, _All right, Kevin Carter, clicking away_ , waving a scribbled-on lyric with the same name-- and you shrug and laugh, but they don't stop you from snapping away. Sean passes you an edited version of your lyrics and you put the little camera down to review. It's a routine-- write, edit, review, edit, learn some chords, let James and Sean play around until they find music and record a demo. You're used to it, comfortable with it almost, and you can tell from the rest of the band's relaxed shoulders that they are relieved you seem comfortable and cooperative this week. You hate that they have to feel relieved. During a lunch break on the last day, you drive into town and take money out of the bank for a little shopping trip. When you get back, James is lugging gear into a rented van. You wait until he's done to give your friends their presents. A new CD James has been talking about, the _Telegraph_ and a chocolate bar for Nicky, and a new handheld game for Sean. You give the binder to Nicky last, feeling the heaviness of all your thoughts inside it. Nicky grins and promises to look through it when he gets home, where he's got a desk and a quiet corner to read in.

You drive back to Cardiff but you don't feel any lighter. Nicky's got your words but it doesn't feel like enough. You don't know what's missing, but something isn't right, something inside you wants out and you don't know how to let it. You want to get away from your surroundings, from the feeling of powerlessness imbued in it all. Everything just smells so powerless, looks so powerless. You feel the helplessness of every puny human life. Even your own insides feel ineffectual and grasping, and you want to get away from that sensation. You find yourself obsessed with time, with knowing what time it is, with the hyper-awareness of time passing that your new sobriety and freed-up schedule has brought to you. You don't know why this has become an obsession; it makes you terribly anxious, the idea of seconds minutes hours ticking away and you're fruitlessly clawing at the world trying to understand before-- before what? It feels like time is being wasted, and you don't know why, and you can't seem to figure it out no matter how much you try and make that time useful.

Instead, you find yourself calling Nicky whenever the urge pops into your head, and just letting your mind fall out of your mouth. You don't filter anything, you just let all of the tumbling chaos stumble its way off your tongue and desperately hope that Nicky will understand, that Nicky will decipher it, that Nicky who has known you for all these years will somehow be able to translate your messy, screaming thoughts into something that makes sense. But every time, he just ends up tired and exasperated and more than a little annoyed and you end up apologizing and hanging up and finding yourself involuntarily tearful at the knowledge that nothing seems to be getting across.

So you watch your films again, and read more, and try to write, and try to convince yourself that this is what you wanted, these vast stretches of time where you're forced to try and distract yourself from the mad scramble inside your head. In the middle of yet another viewing of _Apocalypse Now_ , you wonder if maybe your mind wouldn't be this way under other circumstances; you wonder if maybe this is the opposite of what happened before-- your mind collapsing before your body. If this is a massive overload of energy before the short circuit. If you'll ever be able to make sense of anything again. A completely different thought on the perpetual nature of war and the _Mahabharata_ slams to the forefront and the first thought slips away. You think about Kevin Carter, about the pain of knowledge, the pain of seeing things you shouldn't see and knowing things you shouldn't know and the paralytic internal inertia of finding no action is enough. Your mind feels like a supernova, like a race you can't slow down. You want to use everything you ever known, everything you can learn, to try and get away from what you know. You think of Meister Eckhart's famous quote, _I pray god to make me free from god_ , that desire to get away from all that you have been conditioned to think, all that you have been told to know, in order to find some sort of truth. Only you don't know if you'll ever find a truth. You are disintegrating too quickly, all the things that you have ever known or thought compounding and swirling in your head, a mass too confused to make something solid from.

One evening you get a telephone call from Rachel. Her soft voice on the other end of the line is sad and worried and you are instantly anxious. The news of Snoopy's death is an absolute punch in the gut. There is suddenly a void in your body where there had once been something. You hope the ringing in your ears doesn't translate through the telephone. You tell Rachel you'll pick her up from her house tomorrow and you'll find a tree to plant when you bury him together. _Call James or Nicky_ , she tells you, but you don't; Nick's in Barcelona with his wife and James is probably enjoying himself in the city centre. Instead, you stand in the middle of the living room floor and allow all the thoughts to crash over you, allow their chaos to sweep you away until you're frozen in the centre of your apartment, staring at the ugly brown carpet of the pre-furnished flat.

Yet another constant, gone. You cut ties with your old self back in the Priory, your ability to drink is gone, you smashed up your guitar at that last gig, your faith has been twisted round backward and confused, your mind has turned itself inside out so you can barely even express yourself, you've read every book in your flat, you've tossed so many pages in the river, and now Snoopy. There's nothing left. You could leave all this and it wouldn't even make a difference. You don't need anything anymore. You barely _are_ anything anymore. You realize that you were right to reject everything. God and religion has only served to scramble your brains, attempts at love-- human or animal-- fail or die or go away, and trying to express your ideas and thoughts when clearly you cannot no longer matters. There are no possibilities left. You've tried them all. You've gone to university, gone to America, lived in London, you've seen the bare horrors of Auschwitz, been worshipped in Japan and ignored in France, eaten --or not eaten-- food all over the world, been in and out of treatments, kissed girls and boys and people in between, you've been drugged up to your eyeballs of your own volition and not, been sober, read hundreds of books, seen dozens of films, you've hacked yourself to pieces, written three albums, and been mocked and exploited mercilessly in the press. Nothing. Works. There's nothing left to try. The ugly brown carpet sucks at your feet. There's nothing else. You could vanish. You could be weightless. You could be empty and nothing and floating because everything is temporary, even you. Nothing stays, everything leaves or dies or fades away or finds something better. You've let everything go now: the bad lyrics were swallowed by the river, the good lyrics are in Nicky's hands; you've kicked the drinking, and maybe the cutting, and well, food still isn't all that attractive so you guess you've given that up too; you've watched your favourite films over and over, read old and new books more thoroughly than you ever thought you would, and there's nothing left to get out of them. Your mind and your mouth and your pen are fighting with each other; words that make cohesive sense are growing more and more impossible. And Snoopy, your best friend, your confidant and playmate before you and the rest of the band became a tight-knit group, is gone forever. You don't believe in heaven. You blink and turn to check the time. It is three in the morning, and you have been standing in the centre of the room, thinking, for hours. Snoopy is gone. Everything is gone. You catch sight of your own reddish hair hanging in front of your face.

Not everything.

The buzz of the clippers echoing loudly off the bathroom tile reminds you of getting tattooed. This is different; this is taking away, not adding on. This is removing a mark of futile vanity. This is refusing to express yourself with your body anymore. You don't want to be you. Down to the scalp. You want it gone. Clumps of henna red fall around you on the counter, the floor, the sink, and suddenly all you want is to be a simple, anonymous, unrecognisable stick-figure face. You stare at your own bare-headed, sleepless reflection in the mirror until your features break down into meaningless components. It's almost five in the morning, and you drag yourself to your bed and drape one arm across a pillow at your side like you used to sleep with Snoopy when you were a child. The muscle memory slams the past into the present and suddenly you are sobbing into the pillow, grieving for the present and the past and your beauteous childhood as much as for Snoopy.

You don't know when you fall asleep, but you wake up at nine feeling cold, sore, and distant. You are still clutching the pillow to your chest, and the realization depresses you, that you've become so pathetically lonely it's down to hugging pillows in your sleep. You get out of bed, brush your teeth, and take off the pyjamas you've been wearing for days. For some reason, you have to concentrate on remembering to get dressed in warm clothes; it is bitterly cold out and you know you're going to be outside. You find a beanie with a red yarn bobble in the back of the closet and pull it on over your bare scalp.

You go to pick up Rachel, who hugs you very hard when she answers the door. You stare at each other with teary eyes, and for a moment it feels like a true connection to the the world outside of yourself, then she asks you if you'd like something hot to drink before you go, and everything slides back behind that muffled wall. You drink coffee at her kitchen table and hold each other's hands and she listens patiently while you try and articulate just what Snoopy meant for you. Childhood, happiness, innocence, purity. You don't really know how to explain that it feels like time is collapsing, like the distant past and the more recent past, all your personal experience and knowledge of history, the present, and the huge, sucking, black future are rushing in towards each other to some sort of implosion. You don't know how to explain that there are so very few things left for you to cling to, and it's all becoming so overwhelming, and you are starting to think in fragments and black holes. You don't know how to explain that you just want to get away from everything, away from looks and questions, get away from yourself.

You give up trying to explain, finish your coffee, and drive to the garden centre. The two of you spend an hour picking the perfect tree for Snoopy. Rachel shivers in the cold air and buries her hands in her coat and unthinkingly, you give her your bobble hat. She makes a sound of surprise when your bare head is uncovered but you shrug it off and give her the hat anyway. You're so unconnected to your own body most days, the cold doesn't bother you much. The tree you pick is tiny, still young and fresh and pure, perfect. You drive to your parents' house with leaves brushing your shoulder and the side of your neck and dirt getting all over your back seat.

Your parents look at you with a pure sort of sympathy and for once you know you're all on the same page, you're all grieving for the same thing. You wonder if the void inside of them is as big as the one inside of you. The void in your head, too, seems to be getting wider. You remember the camera in your coat pocket and take it out, take pictures of Mam and Dad and Rachel. They smile and pose for you and don't ask questions; you've been acting so strange lately, you wonder if anyone will ask any questions anymore.

You bury Snoopy in the front yard of your parents' house. Seeing his old body so still and stiff is the hardest thing you've done in a while. Harder than getting sober. Harder than touring. Your childhood, gone. The purest thing in your life, dead and cold. You stroke his soft head and clutch the fur at his shoulder one last time before helping your father lower him down. You don't realize how hard you're crying until Rachel puts her arms around you and you realize that you are shaking. Once you've managed to calm yourself down to hitching breaths, you and Rachel bury your beloved childhood pet, then retrieve the tree from your car and plant it just above his head, a marker that will grow. Then the two of you and Mam and Dad go inside and Mam makes you hot cocoa that you can barely get down but you do it anyway. They don't ask you about the band; you reminisce about Snoopy until the cocoa is gone, then you talk pleasantries and ask Rachel about her job and try to manage a smile but you find yourself up against an empty space where smile had been. You feel flat, deflated, undercooked, staring out at the world with a kind of a lack of energy, engagement, reality, anything. Every moment, every interaction feels like you're looking at it down a long tunnel, through a screen, through a dirty window. The only thing that has seemed real in weeks is the fact that Snoopy is dead and it feels like the end of something, but you don't know what.

Rachel's husband comes to pick her up and you walk her to the door. She's beautiful, you suddenly think, beautiful and smart and so wonderful to you. You wish you could have been as good a brother as she has been a sister. She's grieving, you can see it, but she's not letting it consume her, not like you. Part of you wishes you could be like that, that you could feel without those feelings flooding into every single space inside you. Sometimes you feel so full and yet so empty at the same time, it makes you itch. You want to remember Rachel like this, for some reason, so beautiful and strong and good. You look her up and down, trying to commit her to memory, your real memory, not your camera that doesn't catch the way her head tilts when she sees you looking or the way her eyes look at you with so much thought. _What?_ She asks, _What's the matter? Is there something wrong with my belt?_ And you have nothing to say so you don't say anything. You just shake your head and then you hug her, the first physical contact you've initiated with anyone since getting out of hospital, but you hope everything you're thinking and feeling somehow comes across in your embrace. She hugs you back, just as tight, and kisses you on the cheek before joining her husband in the car. You spend some more time with your parents, trying to commit them to memory too, before returning to your own flat. The drive home feels incredibly empty.

Something comes loose inside you after that. Some part of you that differentiated good idea from bad idea, impulse from action, the small portion that was left, seems to abandon you. You go to TJ's in Newport to see a show and find yourself wandering round the venue while thoughts chase themselves round your head-- time passing too quickly, what if there is nothing but what if there is something, all of the past under your feet and in your mind, you wish you could have a drink. Nobody really looks at you or pays much attention; your bald head really does make you anonymous, and the idea of slipping into quiet nothingness like this is comforting. At the end of the band's set you are quietly crying in the toilet over Snoopy. You drive around in circles after, looping through the town, your overplayed tape of _In Utero_ on the stereo, trying to get yourself swallowed by the dark, trying to convince yourself it's a bad idea to go to a pub. You park down the street from one and stare at the doorway until the sky gets light and then you turn the car back on and drive home. There are a dozen messages on your machine, mostly from James and Nicky. They are frantic and worried and looking for you and you remember that you haven't called any of them in almost three days and have been gone for the better part of two.

You call James first and explain where you've been and what's happened. You don't tell him about sitting in the car in Newport staring at the door of a pub for an entire night. You say you were with old friends. He is dismayed and sympathetic and tells you to call if anything else happens. Then you call Nick, but talking about Snoopy more than once in a span of twenty minutes is too much and you find yourself crying again, breath hitching down the line as you tell him what happened. _Do you need anything? Are you going to be okay?_ he asks, his voice full of concern, and god, you love your friends almost more than you love Rachel. They're all so good to you, so generous, and you feel like you don't deserve an ounce of it. _I mean, I'm sad._ You reply, _But it's different this time, I think._ You don't know how to articulate that this isn't the only thing, you don't know how to articulate everything compounding and imploding around you and in you. It's the loss of Snoopy that brings tears to your eyes, but it's everything else swirling around in your mind, the fog that you've lost yourself in, the feeling like there's nothing left for you any longer, the desire to just get out of yourself, that makes your bones hurt, makes it feel like every space in your body is full of boiling lead. You can't find the words to explain it, and you don't want to bother them anyway. You feel like a burden. They don't need to know how sick you feel all of the time.

Nicky, trusting you on your word, stays in Wattsville with his wife. He calls you, of course. But you can't keep up with your own rolling mind and hold a conversation about football at the same time. You can't focus on something like that, not when you need everything in you just to find the energy to stop questioning everything. You can't focus on anything; you act without really thinking about it, because thinking about what you're doing means having to fight your way through the mad rush of words and images fighting for space in your brain. Everything makes you feel exhausted, but you can't turn it off, you can't stop your mental scrambling for some sort of end of the line. You consume books and films and somehow absorb them with only half a mind, pinging connections that remind you of other things and send you on spiralling pathways of ideas that interrupt and tangle into each other for hours. You can't stand the awareness of your own body-- seeing it, feeling it, being inside your own skin-- so you take to wearing shapeless pyjamas sets, striped and floppy and too big, so you don't have to be aware that you have a physical form. You leave your flat only to drive aimlessly for hours, as if you're chasing your roaming thoughts through Cardiff and the surrounding area. The world is so distant, you feel like you're looking at existence through the eyes of a dead man. You don't buy groceries. You forget to eat, even when Nicky reminds you during his calls. You lie in bed without sleeping and listen to _In Utero_ on repeat, like the screaming despair has some kind of answer, like it fills the spaces inside you with something almost familiar.

Impulsively, you drive yourself up to London. You remember, distantly, that Martin and a Sony exec are there at the editing studio, checking on the progress of some video. Part of you makes the excuse that you're driving up there to remind yourself what song the video is for. Part of you has no idea why you're doing this except that you want to get out and nowhere seems like the right place so anywhere is good. You are turning on your car, you are driving out towards the water, you are crossing the Severn Bridge, and then suddenly you are there at the studio, your memory of the trip like the still shots of time passing in _My Own Private Idaho_. Barely-moving snapshots. Music in the background. Even the image is obscured, fragmented. Martin and the others are surprised by your shaved head, surprised to see you here. You're surprised too. You don't really know why you've driven all the way to London, and now that you're here, you know it's not the right place. You perch on a chair for half an hour and chat and look around the place and take nothing in at all. Martin is peering strangely at you, but everyone has been peering strangely at you for months, so you decide to ignore it. It isn't until you're back in your car, back on the road to Cardiff, that you realize you're still in the same pyjamas and slippers you've been wearing for days. Maybe it's harder to hold all this crumbling in than you thought.

Nick calls ahead to make sure you're in and then stops by with his new pup, Molly. She's a beautiful black labrador who cowers nervously behind Nicky's feet at first but, like all dogs seem to do, she quickly warms to you. Tears prickle your eyes at the thought of Snoopy, and you have a short cry with Nicky sat beside you, an arm around your shoulders. When you've finished, you sit on the floor and stroke Molly's head while Nick sits on your sofa and watches the two of you. You remember how you watched the lights blink on and off across the water last night for a long time, until something heavy falling into the water below shook you from your stupor and for the rest of the night you felt like you were under water somewhere. _Nicky..._ you start. _Yeah, Rich?_ You shake your head, _Never mind_. The dog captures your attention again and you play with her as Nicky's stare brushes across your shoulders. He finally mentions your lack of hair, and you reach up and rub your fuzzy scalp. _It's amazing,_ you tell him, _it just clears all the vanity from inside of you. It just doesn't matter anymore._ You are trying to convince yourself. You don't tell him that it feels like your body and your brain are on different planes of existence. You don't tell him that when you stare into the mirror you see your reflection and it doesn't feel like there's a reflection there at all. You don't tell him that you hate your own skin so much you think maybe you've forced yourself to forget it exists. Before he goes, Nicky reminds you gently that you have an interview tomorrow with a Japanese journalist. You feel bad about having to cancel the Asian tour because of your inability to function, so you force yourself to remember, force yourself to put on a clean pair of pyjamas after Nicky leaves, just in case you forget tomorrow.

You go to pick the journalist up from the train station and are relieved as soon as you see her. She's interviewed you all before, since the early days, and you remember how comfortable and polite she is. Despite the fact that you are dressed in pyjamas in the train station at noon, she doesn't bat an eye. _In Utero_ is still in your tape deck; you only turn it down a little with a guest in your car. You make coffee, as much out of politeness as for the fact that the caffeine helps you concentrate, so you can properly answer questions. The interview questions are normal, nothing new, and the caffeine helps you manage your thoughts. But suddenly, halfway through, something clears in your head, just a little, and you're able to lean forward and think, and talk, and you're willing to try and explain yourself. Like your interview with Simon, you feel okay here, not like you're being stared at, but like you're being spoken with. She is observant and intelligent, soft-spoken but quick to pinpoint subjects of interest in your words. She's sympathetic and gentle when you speak, trying to understand your pain and thoughts with empathy. You focus on your words, trying to speak in simple, full sentences, trying to distill it all down as much as you can. Getting rid of all the chaos flying around inside, trying to compound it as it comes out. You even show Tsukagoshi your favourite books, your autographed _Echo & The Bunnymen_ single you got when you were sixteen, your family photos. Trying to connect yourself to yourself; maybe if someone else sees all this and writes it down it'll mean something, it'll matter, it'll stop trying to disappear.

Displaying your childhood photos triggers a cascade of thoughts about the past, your family, your friends, university, playing football in the dirt, Nick dancing in the rain in his mother's blouse, watching television with Rachel, all four of you squeezed into one bunk bed while Sean and James try to teach you how to play guitar.

You drive Tsukagoshi back to the train station, but instead of going home, you drive back to Blackwood and knock on your parents' door. They're happy to see you. Your mam rubs her hand over your growing hair, _It's so soft! It's like a new start, isn't it, love?_ You sit on the sofa with a mug of tea like you used to as a teenager and talk with them. But a part of you is outside of yourself, staring at them, watching, and they seem so normal and lovely. What could they have done to deserve a fucked up mess like you? You smile wider for them, even eat some biscuits for them. When you leave, you kiss them both on the cheek and spend an extra moment hugging your mam, wishing you were a child again.

The better part of a week passes in a daze of whirling thoughts and you barely get out of bed, too busy trying to manage all the things inside your head. It feels like your mind is full of ruined objects, every thought fragmented and incomplete, muffled and confused and unscrambling your own code is paralytically confusing. Your fingernails have been gnawed to bleeding. This chaos in your brain is making you paranoid and restless, this depression freezes you into shapes you can't understand. You take calls from Martin, Terri, Gillian, Rory the tour manager, James, all in preparation for the flight to America. How are you meant to field terribly uninteresting and uninformed interview questions when your mind is like this? You don't want to go to America. You can barely handle a day out of the house without your head going strange and erratic, much less two weeks in a country that makes you feel depressed and angry and belittled. To America, you're nothing but a bunch of silly dramatic English kids. You're not real in America. No one is real in America. America's dead; it's never been alive. In America, the only truly famous people are dead people. In America, the lie is so perfectly gift-wrapped that they all believe it and it's hard to go anywhere in the country without wanting to scream in people's faces that they don't know how well and truly fucked they really are. No one cracks America, they just get assimilated.

You don't want to go to America. There is nothing left and America doesn't matter anymore. You don't want to answer any more questions. You don't want any lights, or cameras, or microphones, or big white idiot smiles in your face any more. You don't want to have to try and explain yourself when language is slipping away at an alarming rate. It feels like everything around you is boiling, it feels like you are being slowly crushed, it feels like the world is shoving at you from every direction. You don't want to go to America. You don't say anything.

Back in Surrey, you rehearse for two more days. You concentrate on your friends, forcing your mind outside itself so you can talk and cuddle with Nicky, joke and play with Sean and James, watch them all and commit them to memory like you've done your parents and sister. Because something inside you feels like you're running out of time. Nicky tells you he'll have to have another go-round with the lyrics you've passed on, since so there's so much condensed into each song. You get it, or think you do. Being outside your head looking in at all these words must be overwhelming. They tell you that you don't have to go to America if you don't want to, if you're not up for it, but you have to. You can't let them down by staying behind during the hardest part of the tour. You go over the chords for all the songs that usually end up on the set list, but it's so hard to focus even when you try, and you keep messing up. James' voice is gentle when he corrects you, and that makes you dissolve into tears. Everyone is so patient and loving and you don't deserve it, you can't handle it. You'd almost rather him be angry at you, or disappointed with you. Those are emotions you can understand. But this unending patience, this love and support, it hurts because it feels like nothing is ever going to get better for you, and you're wasting their time and energy because you cannot seem to make yourself believe in yourself the way they believe in you.

As you pack for America, every movement feels like it's taking place under water. Every molecule inside you is resisting this journey, but you've fucked up too many times and let too many people down. You can't make them cancel this tour too, just because you're weak, just because you can't handle a little travel and talking to some ignorant surgically-smiling bastards. You finish packing, then sit in the middle of your bed and call your parents. Your mam picks up, her lilting voice down the phone reminding you of years ago, when you were at uni and would call her just to talk, and she'd put the phone up to Snoopy's ear so you could talk to him, and sometimes Rachel would talk to you too, if she wasn't in school when you called. And now here you are, bare-headed, hunched over in pyjamas in the centre of your bed, your entire body screaming at you, unable to properly speak. You admit, at some point in the conversation, that you do not want to go to America, and how much you hated everything about it last time. She tries to reassure you and you smile a little at her effort, but your insides are in pulsating knots and your skin is crawling and your mind is chewing at itself. It's time to leave, so you send kisses down the line and tell your mam you love her, then you hang up. The walk from your bedroom to the car is very long. You can't stop looking at everything as if you are walking a gauntlet, as if America is going to eat you, as if you'll never see any of this again.

In the car outside the hotel, James plays you the demo tape of your song about zoo animals, and it's the saddest and most beautiful thing you've heard in a long time. Suddenly, hearing your own stark words sung back to you over bare acoustic guitar makes your stomach clench. You tell him you love it, and it's true. It's not the type of tense chaotic dub poetry-indie dance-metal adaptation that you had in mind before, not the type of chaos that you thought might adequately express your inner state at the moment, but the slow aching acoustics and the dejection in James' voice find a connection in a different, more curled up part of you. The part of you that wants to run away and find darkness and hibernate. The part of you that wants to shrink down into nothing. The part of you that wants silence rather than clarity.

The two of you check into the hotel, in rooms just down the hall from one another, and agree to meet up in half an hour. As you put your things down, suddenly all you want to do is find someplace warm and dark and curl up inside it. You sit down on the end of the bed and stare at the empty television, its convex screen as black and reflective as your mind feels. Your reflection in the darkness is distorted, but staring your mangled self in the face on the inside of a dead television screen feels more accurate than any mirror you've gazed into in months.

The feeling of impurity descends over you again and your skin crawls. You wrap your arms around your shoulders and hunch over, but the feeling remains. You want out of your body, want to peel off your skin to get all the discomfort out. Impulsively, you run a bath. Like a baptism, you think. Clearing yourself of everything before America. America. Your stomach lurches at the thought of going back there, at the thought of talking, more answering questions that will fall on deaf ears. You've said so much, in your lyrics, in the answers you've given to journalists who engage you instead of belittling you. You want to scream at them all, _Look at the words! Pay attention to my words!_ But you know they won't listen-- nobody does. You've spilled your heart and mind and soul into your words, imprinting them on paper and releasing them into the world. You've written lyrics and letters and poems and stories and manifestos and scripts and rants and lists upon lists. You've referenced high art and low art, talked politics and psychology and music, discussed the past and the present, concepts and platforms and emotions. You feel as though you've spoken about everything under the sun and now you are past explaining yourself. Words are becoming inadequate jumbles of sounds and letters that cannot seem to capture what you are thinking about. You've written yourself into a lack of language. When you rejected everything, you didn't realize your mind was rejecting words too. And now you are trapped, mute and unable to string together even a poetic sentence to explain yourself. It's a sensation you've never experienced before, and it is terrifying and traumatizing.

James knocks on your door and you drag yourself back to reality. You wrap a towel round your waist and answer it. He leans casually in the doorway, _Do you want to go look about on Queensway? We could do some shopping before America, if that sounds good to you._ You don't know what sounds good anymore. You feel twitchy. You've got rid of everything, you don't want material items anymore. You don't want to consume. You are tired of participating. You tell James you'd rather go see a film. _Alright, I'll come back in an hour. You'll be done with your bath by then?_ You tell him yes and shut the door. The bathwater is uncomfortably lukewarm when you get back in. Through the wall you can hear the rush of pipes pumping water to and from other rooms. The fabric of your mind feels like it is tearing.

The water gets cold and you wrap yourself in one of the hotel's towels and suddenly, sat naked on the unfamiliar bed, all you want is to curl up with something soft, with Snoopy, with Nicky's dog, under a fuzzy blanket, with the cat back at Blue Stone, anything warm and comforting. You put on your pyjamas and curl up on the bed and wish there was a way to hug yourself so you didn't feel you have a body. James knocks, _Ready to go, Rich?_ You're in your pyjamas, feet bare, bristly hair still damp. _I think I'd actually rather stay in tonight. Sorry._ You hate this, always turning your friends down, burdening them with the impossibility of your problems. He shrugs, dismissing your apology with a half smile. _S'okay. I've got some friends I can meet up with. See you in the morning, bright and early?_ And you tell him, _Yes, of course I'll be there, you'll see me._ Because through all this you have never been late, never missed a flight or a call time or a car. Your timeliness has always been something you can control, something you've been proud of. Perhaps it's the only thing you have left, now.

So you turn on the television and sit on your bed with your arms wrapped around a pillow, trying to focus on the images flickering across the screen. But all you can see is your own face, distorted on the other side of the glass, gazing back at you, scared and confused and so wrong. It feels like the television is staring into you, just an extension of the rest of the world watching you, devouring your insides, begging to see what comes next. And you're about to go to America, where you'll be forced to sit in front of the massive eye of the camera, picked at by journalist vultures, and bear the bored, judgmental scrutiny of unenthusiastic audiences who don't hate you so they just watch you like zoo animals.

You feel caged in this tiny room with its off-white walls a little too reminiscent of a hospital and the windows that look out into the blackness of night, and you know Hyde Park is just a few blocks away, you know you could just wander for a little while, you know escape is out there, but it feels like everyone on the street will be looking at you. All you want is to be invisible, to divide yourself down into the smallest, tiniest parts so no one will stare at you and you won't actually exist. You feel sick in your own skin, trapped in something you can't get out of and it is an overwhelming and terrible feeling. The television is too much, too loud, too many things flickering into your face, so you turn it off. It is one in the morning, and you have to get up at nine to catch your flight to America. And you are so tired, but sleep never comes easy. Much as you hate your nightmares, the things your mind makes up in your subconscious, not being awake might be better than this uncomfortable hyper-awareness of your own body. Sirens wail in the distance as you turn off the light and curl up under the covers with your pillow, staring at the ugly painted desk under the window. Everything feels bleak and hollow and you cannot find a way to explain why. At some point, you slide into a sleep filled with dreams that are almost-nightmares, too real to be terrifying and too terrifying to be real. Then blackness.

You wake up to two things that there is no language to accurately express: absolute void, and utter chaos.

Everything you have tried to compound inside of your head has exploded; your thoughts were spinning faster and faster and now something has come loose and there is so much noise inside of you that it has formed a centre of utter nothing and everything around the edges is screaming itself raw but there is too much and you can't understand. You grasp for thought but it comes up empty, and the fragments you can feel dancing on the outskirts of your mind disappear as quickly as they come into being. Trying to look into your own head feels like staring down some vast chasm, the edges crumbling and falling into the black in tiny avalanches of chaotic, incomplete thought. You need to reconnect yourself to yourself, you need to find something to grasp to, the things that are familiar, that made up your identity, so you grab a box that holds some of the books and tapes you've been obsessed with and dump them onto the bed. Your notebook is on the table and in the back is the plastic sheet you collect images and quotes and cut-outs in. You find the Pritt stick from your last endeavour in the pocket of your backpack and begin gluing pictures and quotes to the box.

You force yourself to concentrate on what each thing means. Here's a quote from J.G. Ballard-- he taught you that beauty can be gruesome and that writing is allowed to be strange. Here's an image of Yukio Mishima, who was disciplined, who was sensitive, who stood up for what he believed in and died because it failed. Here's an image of Kurt Cobain, who made everything look so easy and who took the world by storm so you could make your art, who died because the media and his agency used him up and never listened. Here is a quote from Primo Levi, who made it out of the Holocaust so it would not happen ever again, but became its victim by his own hand. Here is Kate Moss, icon of beauty and fashion, the waif-like anti-supermodel. Here is a painting by Francis Bacon, whose bodies were always twisted and malformed, who struggled to paint the smile. Here is-- Here is-- Here-- You continue sticking pieces to the box, but your brain has faded out into a black hole. You don't remember yourself; you don't remember why you're waiting, you don't remember what this is supposed to mean to you now that there is nothing outside of you and nothing inside of you. This isn't working.

You put all your books and things back inside the box. You can't remember you anymore; the box isn't for you now, it has to be for someone else to figure out. This will be you, trying to explain who you are so that someone else can explain it to you. You don't know who to leave this to. Who will understand? Is anything making sense to anyone? You are tired of trying to be understood, you are tired of trying to speak when you can't. This will be your last shot at communication, and you don't even know who to talk to. You write 'I love you' on the piece of hotel stationary, and you know you mean it, but it could be addressed to nearly anyone-- your friends, your family, the girl you think maybe you want to love, your dog, your old self that you wish you'd never lost.

Putting the box on the bed is like a trigger being pulled. Suddenly there is no air in this room, your body feels like it's being compressed, and everything is louder than before, but somehow muffled. The void in the centre of your brain is sucking everything away and the only coherent thought is more sensation than words: get out. Get out, get away, from this hotel, from America, from everyone you're burdening, from everybody watching you, from the future, from the past, from your own disintegrating mind. You need to _leave_. You get dressed in black jeans, a t-shirt, and your parka, and shove your notebook, medication, and wallet back in your backpack, your ragged bitten fingernails catching on the fraying embroidered flap. Pack of cigarettes in your coat pocket. Shoes on. Hat on. You can't take anything else, it's too much, you already feel like you're being dragged down, so you wrench the door open with the backpack on one shoulder and walk away down the hall, the fluorescents overhead buzzing in your ears and hurting your eyes.

You don't even try to come up with a plan or think about what you're doing, you just turn on the car and swing out of the car park, driving randomly and without decision until you find yourself on the familiar road home, out of London and back to Wales, back across the water to Cardiff. You want to urge the car faster so the impulse to flee burns less fiercely and frantically in your guts. You feel cut off from the world by your head, by the metal and glass surrounding you. Silence is no good; silence is making you hyper-aware of the nothing in the middle of your mind, and the incoherent screaming at the edges that you're too twisted up and terrified to try and unscramble. You turn on the tape player and Kurt's voice wrenches itself out of the speakers as if his words are being ripped out of his throat. You've been listening to this album on repeat since it was released, but in the last few weeks it has overshadowed everything else. There is something in Kurt's voice that you are gripped by, that feeling of loneliness, of being skinless, of inarticulate isolation, of being drenched in chemicals that burn, of being six thousand shards of metal and glass. You will never be Kurt Cobain, but when you listen to this album you know you will never not be his words.

In your flat, you reduce yourself even more. The things you don't need get pulled out of your backpack and scattered on the kitchen counter-- receipts, change from the Severn toll, your medication that has only made your mind louder, faster, more chaotic, passport, glue stick, the credit cards from your wallet. Your collages stare down at you from the wall, but they can't help you find yourself anymore. You are shrinking to just the basics, just the necessities and nothing else.  
  
You wish you could leave a note to someone but you have no idea what you'd say-- there's nothing left that you have to say, no more words that you can untangle into something coherent. And anyway, you don't want anyone following you anymore, you don't want anyone watching you, you are tired of people never understanding what you are trying to say, you are tired of everyone wanting to know your life but never knowing you. And you have been thinking about it for so long-- just getting out, getting away, just being able to disappear so that everyone can forget you and go back to their lives, so that you can shrink down into nothingness and not have to feel yourself existing ever again. Nothing is going to change unless you do something about it, so now, with a hole in the middle of your brain and your skin screaming, you are doing something about it.

If you stay here, they'll find you. James will call Martin and then Nicky or James or Martin or your parents will come to your flat and ask you why you ran away and you won't be able to explain your need to escape, you won't have the words to make them understand how much you want to stop feeling so paranoid, how you want to get out of here-- whatever 'here' is-- and get away from everyone and everything around you, how you want to climb out of your own skin. How you want to have nothing and be nothing, feel it all dissolve and flatten out into a geometric, organized calm. How the ache inside you has gone past cutting to find relief, how food and sleep are terrifying and repulsive, how you wonder if you are becoming a void, and if maybe that might be better. They'll shake their heads and cry and send you back to hospital where you will go back to the circular, impossible questioning of everything you've ever known and believed, where doctors will treat you with patronizing looks, where they will only believe your pain if you start to think you're in Vietnam somewhere, surrounded, or you are convinced you're Joan of Arc at stake before the fire has been lit, or if you somehow speak in tongues. The painful scrambling and blanking of the self is never as visible as the changing and masking of the self. They'll believe you, but only enough to put you away, only enough to take your agency and everything you believe. You will end up back in an unfamiliar bed, surrounded by crying strangers, on medication that fogs everything into slow motion, able to sleep but unable to force yourself awake when the nightmares come, a bible in one hand and the AA guidebook in the other, confused and tired and never, ever again yourself. You can't go back to that. Get out. You need to get away.

You are in your car. You are driving completely at random, making blind decisions about where to turn and what direction to take. The world has shrunken down to this extended present, this immediate moment and the one just a few miles ahead. You are driving, and Kurt is in your ears and confusion is in your bones and weeping nothing is in your head. You drive to Cwmbran and make ever-increasing circles around the city and its surrounding suburbs. At some point, you get turned around and Kurt is singing _Out of the sky, into the dirt_ and you are back on the M48 gliding your way towards the Severn bridge. Doesn't matter where you are or where you're going, so long as no one can see you. Crossing, you wonder without much feeling if perhaps Martin is passing in a cab going the other way. Your mind blanks and in London two hours later, you wonder how you got there. You find a petrol station and refuel. Sat in the car waiting for the tank to fill, you dig in your backpack and find the disposable camera. It's a waste not to develop the photographs, even if they will only remind you of everything you are running from. You drive at random through the city until you find a corner shop with an advert for Kodak one-hour film processing in the window. You pay in cash and sign a random name you'll remember, Charles Brown, your stupid propensity for needless connections benefiting you for once. An hour and a half later, you are parked on the street and you are staring at your own hands and you have no idea what you've been doing all that time. But you walk back to the store and pick up your photos and shove them in the bag without looking at them, tossing the receipt on the ground. No names. No past. Nothing needs to exist of you.

And then there is no future. You have no goals, no tasks, no nothing. The future stretches out in front of you as one long, unimaginable blanket of impenetrable blackness. You are terrified of it. You are terrified of existing for long, undetermined periods of time. You are terrified of being anything that requires anything of you. You feel flayed, like your ribcage has been cracked open and exposed to the air. Your marrow is cold. Your brain feels like one long scream of feedback in a dark room. It twists around itself, lost, confused, desperate, crumbling. Time starts to shudder and leap and distort.

You begin to lose more hours than ever before. You are in London and it is seven at night. Then it is four in the morning and you are in Swansea sat in the car park of a supermarket with a packet of Walkers unopened in your lap. You're only a little surprised; you have gotten used to small time skips and voids ever since you were put in hospital. You crawl in the back seat and try to sleep and when you wake up, the sun is out and some woman is peering in your window, probably trying to figure out if you're homeless or just drunk. She sees you looking back and scurries away, embarrassed. From Swansea you drive back to Newport and find yourself in the most anonymous place you can think of-- the Market Square bus station. You sit in your car and stare at the people on the pavement outside, until you suddenly tune in to your bodily needs and realize how badly you need to pee.

You are washing your hands in the station bathroom when you lose time again. Four hours later you are driving down some unfamiliar suburban street, possibly in Newport, or elsewhere. You're not sure you care anymore. You don't have a clue what to do with time, what to do with the future, what to do with your own existence now that you only half-exist. You should get out of Wales. You should get away from London. You should go underground, or live in a bunker somewhere like J.D. Salinger, the way Nicky always joked about. Only it's you who's vanishing, not Nick. They're all probably looking for you, waiting for you. You can't go back there. You feel hounded; everyone always wants to know what you are, who you are, how you are. You can't do that anymore. You follow a main road until the sign for a cheap motel looms out at you; you pull into its lot and pay for three nights in cash. You think about Kurt Cobain's fake hotel signatures and some distant fragment of your mind laughs as you sign yourself in as Simon Ritchie, the layered ironies a vague resurfacing of your sense of humour.

You unlock the room and step into a black hole. You resurface to the rugby playing on the muted television and someone knocking on your door. _Housekeeping_ , a gentle female voice calls, _Excuse me, housekeeping._ You open the door and ask what day it is. _The eighth, and you've got to pay for another night if you want to stay. Otherwise you can check out at the front desk._ You apologize, saying you overslept, turn the television off and pick up your bag. You check out, then sit in your car wondering what is happening to you. You've lost three days. You need to get out of Wales.

After an hour, you have managed to focus your thoughts enough to drive purposefully. Once you've crossed the Severn for the fourth time since leaving everything behind at the Embassy, you pull into the Aust service station to refuel. Impulsively, you buy a burger and some chips and a coffee like you used to when the band would drive back from London at four in the morning, flying high on adrenaline and stinking of gig sweat. You eat in your car without registering flavour. You think about your friends, about how much you love them. Everything you love about them. Nicky's grin and loyalty, Sean's wit, James' incredibly patient need to understand. You think of how much you weighed them down in the past two years, how they could have been massively successful if it wasn't for you. You only need to think of the fragile, sweet beauty of Nicky's lyrics you'd demoed back in Surrey compared to your own vulgar, inaccessible, wounded words that James always had to force into shape until they came out mangled in a way that somehow made you feel even more viciously honest than before. You only need to remember Nicky's pinched, helpless expression when he visited you in the hospital. You only need to think of their faces when they helped you into bed sloppy-drunk or found you bleeding or watched you pick at your food without ever eating it. You only need to think of Nicky's exhausted expression when you found yourself suddenly shaky and weeping in the back of the van for the fifth time. You only remember every moment they all looked so much older than twenty-six because of your inability to function in the world.

You think of the violence with which your mind is dying. You, the smartest student in school, three A's out of your A levels, a 2:1 in university, in a band known for reading and references and intellectual liner notes, and all of that is being consumed by the void in the middle of your brain. You are being sucked in and spat out again as time distorts around you. You feel wobbly; you know you haven't slept in days. Everything you are doing is now at the lowest instinctual level: eat. pee. drive. escape. You are disconnected from everything you ever knew and anything you ever were.

You are losing hours and days and thoughts to an unknown nothingness that feels as though it is slowly consuming you. The urge to crawl out of your skin, to escape in whatever way you can, is greater than ever. There is nothing left. There has been nothing since before you went to Europe, you just didn't know it; you rejected everything when the nothingness started to catch up with you, and now it has overtaken you. At the edge of England, at the edge of the world, parked in a service station lot as the sun descends towards the water, you sob into your hands for everything you are losing and have lost.

Out of habit, you hook the steering wheel lock in place before you get out of the car. Leaning against the boot, you smoke three cigarettes in quick succession. Your pack is almost empty, so you go back into the service station building and buy three packs, just in case. The woman who rings you up looks straight through you, and you can't tell whether that makes you feel better or worse. You curl up in the back seat of the car with your bag as a pillow and try to sleep, despite the fact that your watch tells you it's only nine.

You wake up at two in the morning, aching all over. You're not sure if it's from the lack of food, lack of sleep, lack of medication, the cold, or the strange scrunched position you've slept in. All of the above, probably. You turn your car on and shiver a little as the heater blows cold air on you for a moment. A light rain is pattering on the roof, and everything outside is utterly silent except the distant susurrus of cars on the road not far away. The lights in the service station are on, but there is no one out here in the car park. The black shapes of other cars in the lot are like strange boulders in the overcast night. This must be what it's like to stand at the top of a cliff. Desolate. Lonely.

You turn on the overhead light so you can reach into the front and put a tape in the player, then settle back into the seat as Ian Curtis' baritone slides out of the speakers. In your bag still are the photographs you had developed and you take them out now, flipping through them with hesitant fingers. Nicky laughing on the sofa in Surrey, James giving you the two-fingered salute with a punk rock grin on his face and a guitar in his lap, your parents at their dining room table, arms around each other's shoulders, Rachel smiling for you in Dad's armchair.

It feels like it was decades ago, in some far away place. None of it seems real. It's like the photographs have sucked out your soul instead of theirs, and your memories of everyone you loved are foggy and dim and tainted with your own stupid pain. You're glad they don't have to watch you fade away.

With the heater blowing warm air at your face and Unknown Pleasures turned low on the speakers, you drift to sleep again and wake to a still raining but much lighter sky. You are surprised the car is still running. You turn the engine off, get out, smoke a cigarette, buy another burger and eat it without enthusiasm.

Now that you've cried yourself empty, you're not sure what you have left. You cannot go back-- you don't want to go back; you know that if you do, your loved ones will be distant, untouchable shapes as intangible to you as the black masses of cars outside the window. You have put everything you can outside of you, rejected it in order to find some sort of control. You became nothing but a single standing object. You hoped leaving it all behind would make it easy. You hoped compounding everything into those final words and images would be the explanation you needed. You hoped maybe Nicky would read it and understand, but he didn't. You hoped maybe you'd be able to reassemble yourself.

Only now you are sat in a car park in the rain, barely able to remember your family, your mind slowly crumbling in on itself, your body wasting away because you hate it too much to care for it, your brain a void pulling in thoughts and images and feelings and memories and vanishing them. All you have is your crippled self, in a body you hate, with a mind that is nothing, stark and alone. You wish you could write something down to explain it. There is no language to express void. Your mind is collapsing, making holes, your skin is still sick, you need to escape.

And if you look up, up and out into the distance, you can see the repeating line of cars about to cross the bridge, hurling their bodies down the highway in an anonymous mass. You could be a part of that. But you are here, not working, not moving, where the earth drops off into cliffs and in the pale blue light of morning everything is cold and stark and unfamiliar. You have not spoken more than fifteen sentences in a week. You don't have anything to say. There is no reason for anyone to listen. People walk past your car without looking at you, heads bent against the rain as they hurry towards their own cars. To go somewhere. To be something. To go back into the world. The bridge stretches out across the water and you cannot get beyond your own skin.

You put In Utero back in the player. Something about the raw, searing sound comforts you. The familiar sound of someone being turned inside-out. You are listening to someone else describe your mind tearing your own guts open. You wish the world didn't have so many eyes. You wish you'd followed your own advice and never grown past age thirteen. You are staring down at your own impenetrable darkness, whispering your horror to no one. You have been killed, by things you did not understand and knew you could not control. Everything that is living is sealed in boxes. Your box has a leak, and all you want is to keep the water from getting any higher. Humanity cannot bear reality; when it tries, it is beaten down. You thought you had something important to say, but you discovered the world is indifferent to suffering. It is only worth it to watch and gape at, everyone always hoping for the crisis. All of life is reduced to repetition, masks, expectations you could never fill. And you've ended up a prism of self-disgust and ruined skin. A failure for everyone to stare at while you desperately try to explain yourself in a language they cannot understand. Nature is cruel but so is the camera and man is more so. Existence is always forced-- every human being is trapped in specificity. A question for the modern Hamlet-- to be, or not, or both, or neither? You've always been horrifically aware of the simultaneity of being yourself and watching yourself, a painful duality you've never been able to escape. History became impersonal when people stopped connecting it to the present. People's lives are illusory. Control is not to be dominated by the carnal body, and you've been trying to live by reducing desire to need. You have filtered the world through your teeth and recreated it with your pen. Like Charybdis you consumed everything and spat it out full of anger and hurt. Since you were a teenager you could see everything so clearly, down to the last detail, every piece of grit and every twisted feature; you've been shouting in desperation for someone else to see, but not a single look of recognition has turned your way. You are nowhere and you cannot stop feeling sick. Anyone can look at anything through a different lens. Systems reasons logic are not always true. Everyone is self-originated and not. And if it all scales down to being consumed, what is the point? You feel shrunken by time, out of sync with the world. There is no proof of the existence or non-existence of God. How strange to experience ego death and vanity at the same time; trying to make up for your own inadequacies to replace the failure of the world. You've always looked for truth but the only fact you've ever had is death. You thought there had to be something more, something behind that, a door you could unlock with enough things in your head. Instead they turned you into Babel and you lost the power of speech. Everything in you and around you is bare, stark, glacial. You feel dislocated. You are the only one left in the basement of a shattered building-- the rubble around you is still shocked and screaming. You tried. You thought it was all cut and dried. You thought you were chasing some fundamental knowledge, some key to why you just keep on existing. You thought maybe there were reasons for this life. You thought you could find the truth. But nothing in this world makes sense.

The stereo is playing All Apologies; Kurt is apologizing to you, for you, regret scraping itself out into the world, a low, veiny ache that travels up your spine to fog the back of your head and you need to get out. Your body feels tense and anxious. You need to move. You need to get outside of this tiny suffocating space.

The air is huge and cold and hollow as you lock the car and walk away from the service station. You light a cigarette and follow the cement path up the hillock to the entrance of the bridge's pedestrian walk. You are the only one on the footpath, even though you can see all the way to the distant opposite end. It is like staring down the skeleton of a long, bare tunnel.

One foot in front of the other, your mind as empty and cold as the wind buffeting your body, and you are in the centre of the bridge, staring out across the water. The cars rush past behind you; to your left is Wales, to your right, England. Any way you turn is unfamiliar. Ellipses and absences stretch out in all directions. The enormous, barren scale of the water cliffs bridge history cars sky country silence overwhelms you and you feel tiny and desolate and hollow.

You take a deep, slow breath of the cold, rain-filled air and stare up past the swooping metal scaffolding above you; you have been reduced to nothing, bare bones without past or direction or meaning or self. You have a choice now.

 

* * *

 

 _Or say that the end precedes the beginning,_  
_And the end and the beginning were always there_  
_Before the beginning and after the end._

 

 


End file.
